942605 - MDN beta only shows translated articles, even when none of them a relevant

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Search, defect, P1)

Description

[Steffen Wilberg]

I was looking for "querySelector".

The result was 
https://developer.mozilla.org/de/search?q=querySelector
was said: "21 documents found for "querySelector" in Deutsch. · Displaying 1-10 of 21 search results. · Search again in English"

Of course, none of the 21 results was a document on querySelector.

So I switched to English:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=querySelector
"313 documents found for "querySelector" in English".

I'd like to have a way to permanently switch to English.
In my MDN profile, I have the Language set to English, but that doesn't help.

Comment 1

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

https://developer.mozilla.org/de/search?q=querySelector&locale=* is already possible, maybe it just needs a UI element?

Where should we put it?

Comment 2

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

Most of the locale docs are outdated or not existent, unfortunately.

I would vote to default to English for search to show everyone good results (as English has the most accurate info in most cases) and then offer the option to switch to docs in a given locale. (reverse logic from what we have now)

It would be good if translated docs would show up along with the English docs results anyways (to encourage translations and awareness that MDN is localizable).

Comment 3

[David Walsh :davidwalsh]

What is the request here?  I see a few points btu do we know what we want to do yet?

Comment 4

[ali spivak]

Florian & teoli will follow up with a more detailed proposal, and check with the community that it will be acceptable, then update the bug.

Comment 5

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

I will check back with teoli tomorrow, but it seems like we had discussions related to locale-aware search in the past already:
:davidwalsh filed a proposal in bug 882005
:groovecoder filed bug 873265 where we discussed about ranking results by locale
Both have been decided to be addressed post-launch if I see it correctly.

(In reply to Steffen Wilberg from comment #0)
> I'd like to have a way to permanently switch to English.
> In my MDN profile, I have the Language set to English, but that doesn't help.

So, the real questions for now might be:
1) Can we easily add such a user setting to let the user chose himself what his default search locale is?
2) What is the default of that setting for not logged in users or for users not having set anything yet?

Comment 6

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

2) We use the request Accept-Language parameter to put visitors into their locale-specific path: https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/master/apps/sumo/middleware.py#L58-62

1) We need to update the middleware to check devmo.model:UserProfile.locale (https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/blob/master/apps/devmo/models.py#L109-110) before checking Accept-Language

Comment 7

[Florian Scholz (Open Web Docs)]

1) Sounds good to me.

2) As this is something we already have for the whole site, I agree to have it the same for the search then. So leave as is.

Other opinions on 2) ?

Comment 8

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I expect to get the results of the search in the same language as the page I'm reading.

So if I'm reading an /en-US/ page, when I'm doing the search I will use /en-US/search?q= and get English results (first).

If I'm reading a /fr/ page, I will use the search widget and get /fr/search?q= and get French results (first).

Accept-language should be used only when I don't give this info, that is if I'm using https://d.m.o/search?q=

This is what is happening now, we should not change this behavior.

To solve the legitimate problem of the original poster, I see the following solutions:
A. Mix English/Non-English results on /de/search?q= pages, with a much lower score for English results. That means that English results will show up only if no relevant page in German has been found.
B. Add an option in the profile to choose the language of the search. (proposal 1)

Comment 9

[Jannis Leidel [:jezdez]]

Fixed in https://github.com/mozilla/kuma/commit/ca27c39684345a2e440f6f911c7d9971ec107ca7 \o/